risible faculty on the one side and the objective tendency to making
faces on the other. Curiously enough, the original German ideas of
caricature appear to have hinged precisely upon the distortion of the
countenance, since _Fratze_, the leading word for caricature, signifies
originally a grimace. Then we have _Posse_, buffoonery (Italian,
_pazzie_), which, without original reference to drawing, would exactly
express many of Mr. ----'s very exquisite drolleries, diving as they do
into the weirdest genius--conceptions of night and of day, of dawn and
of twilight--the mixture of the terrible, the grotesque, the gigantic,
the infinitely little, the animal, the beast, the ethereal, the divinely
loving, the diabolically cynical, the crawling, the high-bred, all in a
universal salmagundi and lobster nightmare, mixing up the loveliest
conceptions with croaking horrors, the eternal aurora with the
everlasting _nitschewo_ of the frozen, blinding steppe. Caricature! What
can we English call it?"

What indeed after this? Except in despair we adopt the child's
well-known definition--"First you think, and then you draw round the
think." I have been more than once asked to deliver a lecture explaining
the process. Of course such an idea is too absurd for serious
consideration. The comic writer cannot give anyone a recipe for making
jokes, nor can a comic actor show you how to grimace so as to make
others laugh in this serious country. We are not taught to look at the
comic side of things--any humorous element may grow, like Topsy,
unaided--nor is the power given to many to explain to others their
inventions. Bessemer, the inventor of the steel bearing his name, when
he first made his discovery was asked to read a paper explaining his
invention to a large meeting of experts. He had his carefully-prepared
notes in front of him, but they only embarrassed him. He struggled to
speak, but failed. Only the weight of the lumps of metal dangling in his
coattail pocket kept him from collapsing. Suddenly he dived his hand
into the pocket and produced a piece of steel, which he thumped on the
table. "Bother the paper! Here is my steel, and I'll tell you how I made
it!" So would it be with a caricaturist. After a struggle he would say,
"Bother words, words, words! Here is a pencil, and here is some paper.
I'll show you how I caricature."

Personally, I have no objection to being caricatured--I frequently make
caricatures of myself. Nor have I